Bath Salts May Be as Addictive as Cocaine, Study Suggests

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Recreational drugs called bath salts, which have gained
popularity recently and have been in the news for their bizarre
effects on users, have the potential for abuse and addiction,
similar to that of cocaine.

Bath salts, which, despite their name, have no use in the tub,
are different variations of the compound called cathinone, an
alkaloid that comes from the khat plant. Currently, 42 U.S.
states have
laws banning many substituted cathinones. Mephedrone is one
of the most common derivatives of cathinone and was listed
federally in October 2011 on Schedule 1 of the Controlled
Substances Act for one year, pending further study. Then on July
9, 2012, President Barack Obama signed a law placing
bath salts containing mephedrone or
the stimulant MDPV onto the controlled substances list.

The drugs can cause a laundry list of body and mind changes,
including dizziness, delusions, paranoia, suicidal thoughts,
seizures, nausea, vomiting and even death.

In the study, Malanga and his colleagues trained mice to spin a
wheel to receive a reward. In this case, the reward was direct
stimulation of a brain circuit involved in reward perception. The
electrical stimulation came from electrodes implanted into the
mice's brains.

"These are tiny, tiny currents at the very tip of a tiny, tiny
electrode, delivering the current to very specific and discrete
brain circuits," said Dr. C.J. Malanga, an associate professor of
neurology, pediatrics and psychology at the University of North
Carolina School of Medicine.

Called intracranial self-stimulation, the method has been used
since the 1950s to look at whether drugs activate reward areas of
the brain. The thinking goes that when the electrical stimulation
is intense enough for the mice to perceive it as rewarding, these
mice will work hard to spin the wheel and get more of that
reward. "If you let them, an animal will work to deliver
self-stimulation to the exclusion of everything else — it won't
eat, it won't sleep," Malanga told LiveScience. [ 10
Easy Paths to Self Destruction ]

During the study, the researchers measured wheel-spinning effort
before, during and after the implanted mice received various
doses of either mephedrone or cocaine.

"All
drugs of abuse, regardless of how they act in the brain —
heroin, morphine,
cocaine amphetamine, alcohol, do the same thing to ICSS, they
increase its rewarding value," Malanga said. So for a lower
electrical stimulation, one that wasn't considered rewarding
previously, the mice drugged with cocaine, say, would then be
willing to spin the wheel.

It turned out that mephedrone had the same reward potency as
cocaine, causing the mice to work for the reward at lower
stimulations.

The study results, published online June 21 in the journal
Behavioural Brain Research, suggest mephedrone and similar drugs
have significant addiction potential, supporting the recent ban
on the sale of bath salts in the United States, signed on July 9,
Malanga said.